Visions of Edith
by Loveedith
Summary: A very old Sir Anthony has gone to heaven. Or has he?
1. In Heaven

Sir Anthony Strallan was in heaven. Quite literally.

After a long life - sometimes happy, sometimes very less so - he had finally left this world and gone to a better place. Which was more of a relief to him than anything else.

Or had he gone to heaven? He wasn't certain if he had or not, everything was so strange.

The last thing he could remember was being out for a walk in London one morning. Suddenly his head started to spin and then he fell to the ground without being able to catch himself.

His last conscious thought was: "Now I'm dying. So be it." After that everything went black.

...

The next thing that happened to him was that he woke up in a very bright place. Or woke up is perhaps too strong words, he was drifting in and out of consciousness.

Sir Anthony hadn't had any very clear preconceptions of what heaven would be like, although he was a religious man. Or perhaps it was _because_ he was a religious man.

But this must be heaven, he thought. What else could it be?

He was lying on his back, probably on the celestial equivalent of what is on Earth called a bed. Above him was something very white. Probably the heaven covered in clouds. The clouds where the angels are sitting, he thought. When they sing and play their celestial music.

His eyes were rather dim, so he didn't see any angels. And he didn't hear any music or singing. Everything was very quiet around him.

But in the corner of his eyes he suddenly noticed someone, a woman bending over his bed. When he looked closer he recognised her.

Lady Edith Crawley.

...

Perhaps Sir Anthony would have realised after a while that this wasn't really heaven. If it hadn't been for Edith.

Because Edith was the strangest thing about it. The thing that made him certain that this wasn't any earthly reality.

It had to be a dream or a hallucination. Or else it must be heaven.

Dreams don't age. But women do. And Edith didn't look a day older than she had been when he left her that horrible day.

When was that? 1920, if his muddled brain remembered it right. After the war when he was wounded and before the new war. Which had also been over for quite a long time.

...

Sir Anthony closed his eyes. He hoped that Lady Edith hadn't come to heaven to reproach him.

* * *

AN: Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you think of the story!

...

I don't know what this came from. There will be another chapter, but just the one, I think.

...

I have 49 unpublished documents - they are chapters for most of my unfinished stories, some of them only stubs. You are not allowed to have more than fifty documents on fanficdotnet. I have reached that level a couple of times, and then I can't save any new ones. So I have to either publish some or throw some away.


	2. On Earth

The young doctor looked down with concern on the old man in the bed.

There was something strange with him. His right arm didn't react to any kind of touch, yet she could find no other signs of a stroke. He was partly paralysed, but that was all.

Was her medical knowledge insufficient for this case?

She was just about to call in an older doctor for a second opinion when she noticed something on the floor under the old man's jacket that was hung over a chair nearby. A letter. Absentmindedly she took it up from the floor and read the address.

Sir Anthony Strallan.

...

Now that the doctor realised who this man was, the fact that she didn't get any reactions in his right hand didn't worry her any longer. He hadn't had a stroke, this was just his old war injury, from the first great war.

The doctor's name was Marigold Lewis, nee Crawley, then Schröder for a couple of months, then Drewe for a year or two, then Crawley again, later Pelham.

Really Gregson.

Or really _not_ Gregson. She considered herself to be Bertie Pelham's daughter and he had done everything possible to let her feel that way. Marigold had been less than three years old when he married her mother and became her father, and she didn't remember anything from the life she had lived before that.

Like most children with a dead parent she had sometimes thought that her natural father would have been much kinder to her. But as a grownup she realised that there wasn't many men on earth that were as kind as Bertie Pelham.

...

Marigold looked down fondly on the old man in the bed. She wanted to give Sir Anthony the best care possible.

She knew she owed him her life. Just as much as she owed Michael Gregson her life. But less than she owed her mother her life, of course.

This was the man who had left her mother at the altar in 1920. That was what had made her mother feel so worthless that she was transformed from the fairly well behaved family girl she had been before into a girl who had been quite willing to give up her virtue to a man who was already married.

It had lead to her mother giving birth to a child out of wedlock. Which was a problematic thing at the time.

But, as problematic as it had been for her mother, Marigold was happy about it. She was that child and if it hadn't happened, she would never have been born.

Marigold was also happy that her mother had taken her back. She knew how difficult it had been to be an unmarried mother or the child of one in those days, but all that had changed by now. Much thanks to her parents campaigns - papa's in parliament, mama's in The Sketch - to make people see the absurdity of it all.

...

Sir Anthony had opened his eyes again now. He looked at Marigold for a long time. Then he formed his first words after falling to the ground an hour earlier.

"Lady Edith!" he said.

Since Marigold knew who he was now, she wasn't all that surprised.

"No", she said. "I'm not Lady Edith. I'm her daughter, Marigold. One of her daughters, that is. There are three of us in all, and the two boys."

The old man looked at her in silence.

"It is funny you should think I look like my mother", she added. "Nobody else ever does. They all think I look like my father, and he isn't even my father, not biologically. I have seen photos of my biological father, but I don't look much like him. I look much more like the father who brought me up. Environment seems to be more important than heritage, at least in my case."

...

Sir Anthony didn't find it all that strange that he had thought the young doctor was Edith.

He was used to seeing Edith in every woman he met that looked even remotely like her. And this young woman was her daughter.

* * *

AN: Thank you for reading! And thank you for your kind reviews.

And Baron, I'm rather certain that you were right, or almost right, in your guess of what happened in the story. It is the most natural explanation, I think.

...

I don't intend to throw any of my stories away, at least not now. What I try to do is to publish them, this is the third update to a story I have published in less than 24 hours.

I try to keep my number of docs below the 50 docs level. I have no intention of saving docs anywhere else than at fanficdotnet. I only take them out by copy and paste and run them through the spellchecker of my editor just before I publish. After I have made the corrections in the on-line version I throw that editor version away again.


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